Much of the computational aspect of my PhD was written in BCPL[0], it's nice to see it's still alive and running.
Greybeard story time:
I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."
About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."
So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.
Fun times.
=================
[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.
[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.
I would be surprised if someone, somewhere, didn't still have a copy of what would nowadays be considered to be an absurdly small amount of data. If they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they read HN.
ColinWright•10h ago
Greybeard story time:
I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."
About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."
So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.
Fun times.
=================
[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.
[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.
[2] http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/coneutron.html
[3] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/CoNeutron.html
[4] https://davidseal.muchloved.com/
[5] https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/1e767638-32b7-4c7b-81c8...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(computer)
skissane•5h ago
Digressing, but I wonder if any copies of Phoenix/MVS survive, and if so, whether it could be made to run under Hercules
lambdaone•10m ago
A backup was taken before shutdown: https://web.archive.org/web/20041115131602/http://www.cam.ac...
I would be surprised if someone, somewhere, didn't still have a copy of what would nowadays be considered to be an absurdly small amount of data. If they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they read HN.